Long Term future of Rimworld

[evrett33]

Tyran is doing fine for one guy but the game needs a catch up "surge" to..catch up with all the work the community has done. That attitude that everything is fine and done and everyone is satisfied is a little scary.

[Tynan]

Tyran is doing fine for one guy but the game needs a catch up "surge" to..catch up with all the work the community has done. That attitude that everything is fine and done and everyone is satisfied is a little scary.

Unfortunately it's not that easy. You can't hire people off a shelf like buying something at a store. In fact I've been trying to bring on help for a long time but it's bloody difficult to do. Maybe my standards are too high, or maybe I'm just too busy making the actual game to put the needed time into hiring. Hard to know.

The community will always be ahead of us, in some sense. Because modders outnumber us hundreds to one. There's no way we can ever "catch up" to all of that anyway. PLus modders generally work in a way that's not really sustainable for a long-term project. They can implement fast but if we worked like that we'd be stuck in a quagmire of hacks and bugs and spaghetti code within six months.

Our role as devs isn't to compete with modders or to "stay ahead" of them. It's to maintain and gently, carefully grow a stable, balanced, dependable core game. We form a foundation for modders and they do crazy stuff and some of that feeds back into the game. We each have our role; it's wrong to compare us.

[evrett33]

Tyran is doing fine for one guy but the game needs a catch up "surge" to..catch up with all the work the community has done. That attitude that everything is fine and done and everyone is satisfied is a little scary.

Unfortunately it's not that easy. You can't hire people off a shelf like buying something at a store. In fact I've been trying to bring on help for a long time but it's bloody difficult to do. Maybe my standards are too high, or maybe I'm just too busy making the actual game to put the needed time into hiring. Hard to know.

Are you offering to pay them in looneys? I know the NHL players are reluctant to accept contracts in such funny. money.

[tommytom]

I, for one, would be interested in helping develop the game.
Someone like myself that is self-taught and hasn't went to school for programming could be a huge asset or just a small helping hand.
I have made tons of small to mid-sized programs in various languages (Batch, Javascript, Java, AutoIt, C, C++, VB, C#, VBS, Bash, Python, PHP).

If you know anything about Notch, he taught himself programming and you see how huge his game(s) got. Sold Minecraft for $2.5bil.

I'm not saying hand the reigns to (somewhat) anonymous forum users, but you could somehow get people in to start fixing small bugs so you can focus on the big stuff. If anything, post a sticky saying to send your resume or something to an email with a specific subject.

[Tynan]

tommytom - actually there is an open call for applications, just check out the Careers link on ludeon.com.

[ZestyLemons]

All the modmakers should go on strike and break their mods for a round. See how many people are playing vanilla Rimworld after a few months.

I play RimWorld entirely vanilla, despite making mods myself sometimes. I usually don't play many games with mods at all actually, Dwarf Fortress included.

[evrett33]

All the modmakers should go on strike and break their mods for a round. See how many people are playing vanilla Rimworld after a few months.

I play RimWorld entirely vanilla, despite making mods myself sometimes. I usually don't play many games with mods at all actually, Dwarf Fortress included.

There are better way to self flagellate. I've heard of people getting piercings on their nether regions.

User was warned for this post combined with others before it: Rule 2

User was banned for personal attacks vs mod via PM. Rule 1

[Gaesatae]

Tyran is doing fine for one guy but the game needs a catch up "surge" to..catch up with all the work the community has done. That attitude that everything is fine and done and everyone is satisfied is a little scary.

Rimworld has provided me with hundreds of hours of entertainment in it's current state, and I don't use mods. It's more than I can say about most games I played the last couple of years. I would say that's pretty good for a game still in development.

The community has been able to create so many mods because of how easy modding can be in this game. It's designed that way, I've never seen anything like it, and I believe it wasn't without costs for the developer. If you remove all the mods that don't require coding you'll end up with a very standard number of mods for a game in this stage. My point is that creating content is very easy compared to creating the structure of a game, and the fact that the structure keeps growing is a very good sign both for vanilla and modded game.

[brobe94]

i feel like the dev is taking his sweet time adding stuff or changing stuff.
not sure how many hours a day he works on it but it doesnt feel like the 8h i would expect from the changes in each update and the time between each update
then again its ONE person and coding can take a long time, so might just be that.

And I'm sure that's your totally informed opinion as a professional game designer and programmer with years of experience, and not just baseless ranting from a clueless idiot who has no idea how time-consuming game development actually is.

I would say this thread was for the most part constructive until this ... whether good or bad someone's opinion should not be attacked by calling them names, etc. Please keep things civil.

With that being said, I have worked on a software / web application project for the government and if people think things are moving slow with RimWorld or any other indie dev studio, they have no idea. Just have a read up on what CMMI is.

[RemingtonRyder]

Eight hours a day sounds like a lot but when it comes to complex code, it really isn't.

I once worked on something called the 'Job System' for a Neverwinter Nights server. There were a lot of nested includes so, to actually figure out what a piece of code did I would have to track it back to some very genericised and uncommented code.

If for whatever reason I didn't understand the code fully, I would then spend the next few hours trying to figure out why my simple fix didn't take.

TL;DR One guy, thousands of lines of code is not a cakewalk.

[tommytom]

tommytom - actually there is an open call for applications, just check out the Careers link on ludeon.com.

Hmmm, I see that now. Yes, you do have pretty high standards. For an indie game anyways, or at least for me. The biggest project I handled was a Maplestory emu server (an MMORPG) many years back. We had 300+ people playing at once and I would apply small fixes, run the website/forum/database/game/events.

As far as actual programming, I haven't done anything major. Just some small projects that I wanted to do. I made a pretty good screenshot program that is good with dropbox, but it doesn't compare to apps with hosting bundled with it (like puush or gyazo), but I have some features that those do not.

[Teovald]

1. As a general rule I don't make promises that I'm not quite sure I can keep. That includes pretty much any promise about future developments for a game that extend beyond a few weeks. Game development is just like that. You can't really predict it. So if I said something about the long-term future of RimWorld, it would just be a guess, and there's no value in me giving out my guesses and pretending they're anything else. So I'm sorry I can't give long-term projections. There are just too many variables.

Maybe you think it's annoying, sorry about that. I, however, wish to be able to say, in a few years, that I've never broken a promise.

I do find it annoying. I understand that you don't want to make promises that you will not be able to keep, especially after disasters like DF-9. On that topic, to be fair, even though they did not make hard promises on their 'future development plans' page, they should have added a big blinking warning that these plans were subject to change AND cancellation depending on the project success. 
The issue I see with this is that I have no idea whether a weak part of the game is here because it is a placeholder or work in progress or whether you consider it finished. I have no problems with weak or broken game mechanics in an alpha, that's the principle after all. However, not knowing whether you consider these satisfying/final makes these weak point frustrating.
I think it is possible to find a balance between 'no promise of any kind so I can't be held accountable for anything' or promise that you will add twice the depth of Dwarf Fortress in the next update. Simply giving stating what will be the focus of the next releases at this point while explaining that it can change at any moment would be great.

[tommytom]

Next release is focus on AI revamp. Dont know if that's the main focus. Lots and lots of stuff Tynan has taken notes and will be going into A10, I'm sure. Some he explicitly said he would.

[_alphaBeta_]

Getting involved in early-access games is risk. Whether the developer makes promises or says nothing of future development, it doesn't really matter - There's no guarantee either way that the game will live up to your expectations once the developer is satisfied and moves on to another project.

Tynan has said on numerous occasions that he'd love to have people as customers now or in the future. The only way to know for sure would be to buy the game once it's "done," where "done" is defined by the developer. Mods play a bit of a role here, but in the end, it's all about what the developer leaves in vanilla game play and what's exposed for mod possibilities.

If you do your research (YouTube "let's play", forums etc.) and you'd be unsatisfied if development stopped tomorrow, then perhaps it's best to hold off and not feel "cheated." If you like the game as-is and are willing to put a little faith forward and have the possibility to even steer the game's development a bit, then buy-in now. (Perhaps it may take a few more alpha releases until you're comfortable.) There are even some that are willing to assume more risk just to support indie development and study the success cases. I was personally a cross between the latter two in the context of the Alpha 4 time frame. As an anecdote, I'll say that this video regarding the region system was what ultimately pulled me in. It told me this developer was serious, worth following, and that I could learn a few aspects of indie development here.

If development stopped tomorrow, I'd be disappointed yes. Would I hold it against Ludeon and be unsatisfied, no I would not. For my original buy-in price, I'd had many hours of enjoyment, learned quite a bit, and feel in some small ways that I've contributed with useful feedback. I've achieved my goals and Ludeon has held up their end considering I understand what buying into an early access game is.

[tommytom]

There are even some that are willing to assume more risk just to support indie development and study the success cases. I was personally a cross between the latter two in the context of the Alpha 4 time frame. As an anecdote, I'll say that this video regarding the region system was what ultimately pulled me in. It told me this developer was serious, worth following, and that I could learn a few aspects of indie development here.

If development stopped tomorrow, I'd be disappointed yes. Would I hold it against Ludeon and be unsatisfied, no I would not. For my original buy-in price, I'd had many hours of enjoyment, learned quite a bit, and feel in some small ways that I've contributed with useful feedback. I've achieved my goals and Ludeon has held up their end considering I understand what buying into an early access game is.

Exactly. I believe in this game and this developer. I felt it was worth supporting and have told others to as well. Indie developers and developers trying something "unique" (albeit, it is fairly Dwarf Fortess-esque). If I was making something awesome, making a living of it, passionate about it, and doing a good job of it, I certainly would want people to buy my game. So, I bought the game. Playing the game is just a bonus, really.